[ad_1]
The 7 billion digital investments of the Development Fund and the upcoming development of 5G seem to be magnets for investment, the exact amount and benefit of which we do not know in employment.
What is the final value of Microsoft’s investment in Greece, which dominated the news yesterday? The investors’ own representatives – that is, the president of the multinational Brad Smith and the general director of Microsoft Greece, Cyprus and Malta, Theodosi Michalopoulos – avoided a specific reference to an amount in yesterday’s presentation of the investment in the Acro Museum.
The prime minister himself spoke of “a total economic benefit, in the long term, which can exceed one billion according to the experience of other states.” Kyriakos Mitsotakis emphasized the symbolic elements of Microsoft’s investment more than the literal ones (amount of funds, jobs, etc.), speaking of the impetus it can give to start-ups or the reversal of the brain drain. “Greece has its sun and now it is getting … its cloud,” the prime minister said, a rather unfortunate figure for the cloud data center that Microsoft wants to develop.
Microsoft Chairman Brad Smith in his speech confirmed the government rumor that it all started last January, in his meeting with Mr. Mitsotakis in Davos, but he was not very clear about the amount of investment: “the Capital investment “for each new data center runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.
What did we finally learn about Microsoft’s investment? All three data storage units will be built in Attica. That the data center is one of the eight that the company operates or will operate in Europe (Germany, France, Holland, Ireland, Poland, Italy and Spain). That as part of Microsoft’s GrforGrowth strategy, the multinational will provide digital skills training to 100,000 employees from the public and private sectors. That there is an ongoing collaboration between Microsoft and the Ministry of Culture for a 3D digital application for Ancient Olympia.
It is unclear which of these is free and which is payable. In any case, Microsoft’s investment is clearly oriented towards digital investment in the State, which, according to the guidelines of the Recovery Fund Commission, will direct at least 7 billion of EU funds to the digital transformation of the State and the economy. It is also vital that Microsoft has privileged, and perhaps monopolistic, access to cloud computing services in fifth generation (5G) mobile telephony, for which all major industries (including China) compete.
■ “Through this investment, the public sector software is delivered to the company in question for the creation of a data center, which with the guaranteed benefits of the state acquires a strategic advantage to dominate the entire Greek economy,” he says in a statement. of the KKE.
